As salaamu alaikum, Twenty-something
years ago, when my parents reverted to Islam, I was an adolescent teen.
I was a child of the black nationalist/liberation movement of the 60's,
who refused to stand for the pledge of allegiance to the US flag. This
patriotic display of love for massa and his 400 years of brutalizing us,
was customary and mandatory at the start of public school classes in those
days. I always felt that black children should be exempt from it because
the constitution at that time (and still does) defined blacks as three-fifths
of a human being. I was once expelled from elementary school for convincing
the entire class to pledge allegiance by placing their hands on their butts
instead of over their hearts.

I was the kid on the playground who
challenged the school bully saying "you can't whip me 'cause I'm a revolutionary!".....I
got whipped often.... but I was still a revolutionary. While the other
kids wore cartoon stickers and buttons, I wore "Free Huey" and "Africa
for Africans" buttons.

I was the kid who won the school
speech contest with my own anti-Vietnam War and memorial tribute to the
innocent victims of the Mai Lai massacre. When school officials convinced
me to change the topic to a more palatable one for the citywide DAR- (Daughters
of American Revolution) sponsored contest, I submitted a speech to the
lily-white, ultra-conservative group on Benjamin Franklin, only to scrub
it and recite the anti-Vietnam War speech once I got on stage before the
judges and audience. Needless to say, I was disqualified and summarily
escorted from the auditorium...but I had my victory...because afterall.....I
was a revolutionary.

I thought the revolution started
in 1969. I didn't realize that the 1969 riots in Detroit were just that
until I was in high school and happened to see a copy of the Congressional
Committee Report. My memories of those fateful days and nights were re-kindled
as I read the report. Memories filled with visions of being shoved under
a table while the house filled with gun toting, black beret-wearing men
and women who were shooting out of the windows at someone or something
on the street...daylight brought visions of armored cars and tanks full
of white soldiers patrolling through my neighborhood shouting and pointing
weapons in what was a 24-hour vigil.

Nearly a decade later, I'm experiencing
culture shock, as I sit on the floor of a masjid full of people that don't
look or talk like me. They are unbelievably courteous and friendly. They
hug and kiss me a lot, and even hold my hand. Soon I see a box being passed
around, it has Arabic writing on it. I don't understand this foreign language
but I see men putting money into it. So I reach into my pocket and pull
out a dollar and place it in the box. Minutes later I see another box being
passed around. For a moment, it reminded me of the times my grandmother
would take me to church and the how I complained about the collection plate
being passed around four and five times during one service. I said to myself
"here we go again.... another one of these money-grabbing schemes in the
name of religion".

As the second box eased closer to
me, I reached into my pocket and pulled out another dollar. That's when
I saw it. On the box was the same kind of strange script that I could not
understand. However, underneath the script was a drawing of an opened book,
a rifle, and a grenade. I realized then that there was another component
to this strange religion. I realized that my parents had not "sold-out".
They didn't abandon the revolution/liberation movement. They "graduated"
and added the one component that was missing from the movement all of those
years....Islam.

Soon I would learn that there is
no struggle (jihad) greater than for the pleasure of Allah....for raising
the banner of Tawheed....for the liberation of his people from institutions
and debilitating systems of man and establishing his sovereignty in the
land.

Recently, some twenty-something years
later, I visited the same masjid. I spent a few days with the jamaat. The
place has changed a lot in 20 years. The believers have changed. They regularly
host kaffir politicians there now. They even distributed a list of their
approved candidates. They put a Jewish lawyer at the top of the ticket
for governor and then distributed the list of candidates (all of whom are
kaffir) as the "Muslim slate."

I witnessed one such gathering there
that really surprised me. A visiting Shaikh was addressing the audience.
The mayor of the city, who arrived late, entered the meeting hall, and
in the middle of the Shaikh's talk, the place erupted in applause and standing
ovation for the mayor.

They don't raise money for weapons
anymore. Instead they lobby the kaffir politicians and beg them to use
their weapons and sacrifice the lives of their beloved sons and daughters
to defend the Muslims. However, they do appease their guilt-conscious somewhat
by throwing money at agencies that feed and clothe the besieged Muslims.
But what about liberation? Where has the liberation box gone?

In their literature, one of the Christian
relief agencies use the phrase "if you give a man a fish you feed him for
one day. If you teach a man how to fish, you feed him for a lifetime".

Muslims should say " If you give
a besieged Muslim, food, clothing, and shelter you make him a fed, clothed,
and sheltered slave. If you give him Quran and Sunnah, a rifle, and a grenade,
the besieged Muslim will liberate himself....feed himself, cloth himself,
and not be put out of his own house!"

Muslims must re-discover and implement
jihad bis saif, as well as the support and defense of mujahideen as serious
obligatory duties in this Deen. We must stop making excuses for that which
Allah has ordained in Qur'an and that which his Messenger utilized in his
seerah. We must stop permitting some of our spineless Muslim leaders from
making excuses and adopting an apologetic posture towards jihad bis saif
as well.

We must develop and promote the attitude
that it is an honor and blessing to support and defend the mujahideen.
If necessary we must make seventy excuses for them and not permit the Zionist
media and the Zionist-occupied governments and their stooges in Muslim
nations to castrate these mujahideen from the body of the believers. We
must also beware of madhaabs and those anti-madhaab folks who are just
as dangerous. Their arrogance and clique mentality and exclusivity can
effectively cause the naive amongst us to abandon the mujahideen also.
More effectively than Zionist media in some cases.

Our brothers and sisters in Kosova
and Kashmir are under some very dire circumstances. Throwing money at the
problem will help some but it won't bring about any solution to the crisis.
Our mission, just as it should've been in Bosnia, should be a two-pronged
mission. Surely there is the humanitarian need that must be met, however,
there is also the long-term need for liberation that must also be met.

In addition to collecting monies,
food, medical, and other needed supplies and delivering it to our brothers
and sisters we must also mount political pressure on our Islamic leaders
at home and on the leaders of the Muslim nation-states.

We first have to free our leaders
from the shackles of petro-dollars and other pimps overseas that have "turned
out" so many of them that they can hardly speak a word of their own volition.
Those leaders who don't want to be independent of their masters overseas
should be replaced one way or the other.

Free-thinking leaders should organize
a mass campaign of protest against those embassies and consulates representing
Muslim nation-states who have thus far issued at best, only veiled threats,
all the while neglecting to use their armies and weapons to liberate the
Muslims of Kosova and Kashmir.

The least that we can do is what
I have done. Fax, write letters or send email to these embassies and consulates
demanding that they aid the liberation of Muslims with moral, logistical,
and physical support. Is this so hard to do? If we can send faxes to kuffar
begging them to bomb our enemies and to rescue our own, we certainly should
be able to send them to the Muslim organizations and the representatives
of the Muslim nation-states. We must remind them of the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah
and the consequences that led to it being abolished. We must demand that
they declare "null and void" these UN treaties that usurp their sovereignty
and aid and abet the kuffar at the expense of the Muslims. These leaders
have no authority to make the Muslim populations of their nation-states
subservient to these illegal Treaties.

Understand brothers and sisters,
that if the rape and maiming of Muslim girls in Bosnia and Kashmir, the
torturous agonizing starvation of Muslims of Iraq, and the abandonment
of the Islamic Solution in Philistine has not moved these leaders to do
anything, they will need to be pressured. We do this on two fronts....

1. the souci-political one - mass
protest against the representative bodies of these Muslim nation-states
and charging them with capitulation to illegal treaties and abandoning
Muslims under siege. Identifying, exposing and protesting against their
agents and "money men" in the local Muslim communities.

2. the physical one - identifying
and supporting the legitimate Islamic movements that are simmering in their
own homelands.

As Muslims we must began to understand
that these knee-jerk, poorly-thought out and poorly-planned responses that
we are so quick to adopt are merely sad imitations of kufr policies and
procedures. Are we like the donkey with loads of books on his back? Because
he's only carrying the books instead of utilizing them for guidance he
is subject to the whims of anyone who comes along and yanks on his bridle.
We have Quran, Hadith, and an extensive Islamic history that we can call
on to solve most of these problems.

If my brother has a blister wound
I have antiseptics and anti-biotics yet I choose to only clean the wound
and give him a bandage, I have only treated the symptom. I've done nothing
for his long-term welfare. If we don't act more sensibly towards the long
term interests of our brothers and sisters we are part to blame for their
suffering. I pray Insha Allah, that we will finally begin to utilize what
Allah has blessed us with.